Microsoft Windows Video Capture

A bit of history

Video capture in Microsoft Windows has undergone two primary periods of evolution.

Video for Windows(VFW) was introduced in the Fall of 1992. Early
drivers captured only in RGB formats, but support for YUV and compressed formats
followed soon thereafter.

With Windows95, improvements were made to support capturing to AVI files directly
from hardware buffers, resulting in no copy operations for optimal efficiency.

Vidcap was the original VFW capture application, and the source code shipped in
Win32 SDKs. AVICap and AVICap32 are DLLs which contain the capture engine used by
most VFW applications.

WDM video capture was introduced with Windows98 and Win2K to support
USB and 1394 video devices as well as analog capture cards with digital and analog
TV tuners. WDM corrects the many deficiencies of the VFW model.

Direct Show Filters

Here are free downloads of a few Direct Show filters which may prove useful
in debugging
capture and other types of graphs.